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Straight White Men: Veteran TV/film actor Austin Pendleton and three other New York actors grapple with gender, privilege

By: Michael Grossberg

The Columbus Dispatch - March 31, 2014 01:14 PM

A white father and his three middle-aged sons confront their own gender
and racial privileges in
Straight White Men.
The Wexner Center for the Arts will present Young Jean Lee Theatre Company’s world premiere
April 10-13 of Jean Lee’s play.
"I’m not actually that fascinated by men – I’m generally much more intrigued by women," Lee
said in an email interview.
"But one thing I found fascinating in this process was learning all the unspoken rules and
codes that we use to limit and confine men in our culture," she said.

Pete Simpson, left to right, Austin Pendleton, Scott Shepherd and James Stanley in the Wexner
Center for the Arts presentation of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company world premiere of
Straight White Men Credit: Blaine Davis

"The biggest challenge was getting people who don’t identify as straight
white men (which includes a lot of the straight white men I talked to, who saw "straight white men"
as conservative jocks) to see themselves in the play, which for me is not primarily about straight
white men, but about privilege," Lee said.

Veteran stage/film/TV actor Austin Pendleton (TV’s
Oz, Good Times, Homicide: Life on the Street) joins Scott Shepherd, Peter Simpson and
James Stanley in the production, which will be performed in New York after Columbus. The
development of the new work has been supported by a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award.
"Young Jean Lee is a very exciting theatre artist," Pendleton said in an email interview.
"When I auditioned for her for an earlier project and she expressed in interest in working
with me further down the road, I just said yes, of course, without any idea of what the project
would be. Just because it was Young Jean Lee who was asking me."
Pendleton plays Ed, the father of three middle-aged sons.
"Ed is really complex," Pendleton said.
"He's had to make his way in the world to get where he has gotten. He is bewildered,
even angry sometimes, about all the complex issues, involving employment processes and the very
idea of what opportunity is, that have come up since he started.
"But he tries very hard to understand. He's more emotionally intelligent than he
sometimes seems. There's a war going on in himself because of this."
Fatherhood issues arise in the drama.
"(They’re) sparked when (Ed) finds it frighteningly hard to understand the confusions that
his sons are having as they make their way in this new and fractured world," Pendleton said.

For Young Jean Lee, her play breaks exciting new ground – in style and
structure if not in subject – given her track record as one of the most avant-garde New York
writer-directors.
"I’ve never written a story-driven, naturalistic three-act play before," Jean Lee said in an
email interview.
"It’s not a departure in the sense that it deals with a lot of the same themes (as her other
plays), but formally it’s a complete 180."

Young Jean Lee. Credit: Blaine Davis

The Asian-American playwright and her (changing) company have visited the Wexner Center
often.
The Wexner Center also presented the world premiere in 2008 of Jean Lee’s The Shipment, a
provocative one-act exploring what it means to be black and whether culturally shaped attitudes can
ever escape stereotypes.
The Wexner Center introduced Lee to central Ohio in 2007, when her company performed
Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, billed as a comically painful exploration of
identity, love and Lee's roots.
Available Light Theatre also staged the central Ohio premiere in 2009 of Jean Lee’s
Church, Jean Lee’s effective blend of comedy, drama, confessional monologue, satire,
fantasy and rousing gospel musical structured and presented as a real-time church service.
"Every project I do is an attempt to do something I’ve never done before, that I have no idea
how to do," Lee said.
"My last piece was a movement piece with no words, and my show before that was a one-person
show with singing and dancing that I (a non-performer) performed. I tend to pick things that would
be my worst nightmare to try, and I’ve never had any interest in writing linear traditional plays
before, so this made sense."
Unlike most of her works, often staged as non-linear one-acts, the new piece follows a
traditional three-act structure.
"I saw the traditional three-act structure as the ‘straight white male’ of theatrical forms,
or the form that has historically been used to present straight white male narratives as universal.
And I thought it would be interesting to explore the boundaries of that form at the same time as
its content," Lee said.
"Most of the stuff we learn about men in the show is stuff we already know. But people have
mentioned that it’s very interesting to see what a family of men is like when they’re together
without any women around."

A RETURN TO OHIO ROOTS
Pendleton, an Ohio native, has appeared in more than 120 films and TV shows over
the past half-century. Among his films:
A Beautiful Mind, Guarding Tess, My Cousin Vinny and Finding Nemo, The Muppet Movie and
Searching for Bobby Fischer.
He got started in acting because of his mother’s influence as he grew up in his
hometown of Warren, Ohio.
"My mother, who had been a professional actress and director before marrying my father and
settling down, became involved in a community theatre that was beginning, after World War II, in
our home town," he said.
"Those evenings, when people would come over to rehearse, is what got me excited about
theatre. The hope that I would be in bed and asleep when I was supposed to did not
prevail. I would sneak down (so would my brother, Alec) and watch. It seemed like the
very air was transformed. That did it."

George Morfogen, left, and Gale Harold in a scene from
Uncle Bob, a 2001 play by Austin Pendleton at off-Broadway's SoHo Playhouse. (AP Photo:
Yasuyuki Takagi)

Pendleton, 74, has written several off-Broadway plays, most notably
Uncle Bob, Orson’s Shadow and
Booth.
"As a playwright I tend to work within a fairly restricted area of human experience,"
he said.
Thus, the actor-writer was drawn to Jean Lee’s work to broaden his experience.
"I love her curiosity. It's very, very unusual in a talented playwright," he said.
"As a playwright, it just opens up my mind and heart."

IF YOU GO
Straight White Men
Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, Wexner Center of the Arts, Performance Space, 1871 N.
High St.
Contact: 614-292-3535,
www.wexarts.orgShowtimes: 8 p.m. April 10-12 and 2 p.m. April 13
Tickets: $22, $18 for members, $10 for students